


gleams of a remoter world

by fatalize



Category: No. 6 (Anime & Manga), No. 6 - All Media Types, No. 6 - Asano Atsuko
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-20
Updated: 2020-02-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:39:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22821112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fatalize/pseuds/fatalize
Summary: Nezumi, wandering among the mountains, wonders what stories he should tell Shion when he returns to No.6, or what he should say to him in general.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 14





	gleams of a remoter world

—And of course there were the mountains, and the rivers that snaked through the mountains, churned on their bellies with their nonstop chatter, but the mountains—how to explain to someone who grew up suffocated and sheltered by barriers the magnificence of the natural walls of mountains, the way the wind held its breath in their gargantuan stillness and the sunset dressed them in its nectarine hues.

He’d rather show Shion. Like everything else, it was something he had to see for himself.

But when would Shion go, if he would go, and Nezumi was getting ahead of himself, anyway. As he walked and walked he thought of all the things he would say to Shion, the different stories he could tell, the fact that nature was more than the forest he knew when he was small, that there was a spectrum of people beyond the West Block and No.6, that the world wasn’t tightly summarized and compact in a book but endlessly writing itself—things he thought he knew, things he had come to relearn.

Should he tell him of the fortune-teller lady first—but that was a heavier story, so why not start at the beginning; but then there wasn’t much at first, and the more profound things would stretch their roots in his mind, and he thought about the musician he had temporarily roomed with and the staircase waterfalls and the abandoned barn with the owls and, of course, the mountains, standing proud over him, making him feel small for the first time in a way that didn’t make him uneasy.

But all of this was idle thought, anyway, an avoidance, a way to distract himself from what he really should be saying first— _hi hello I’m sorry how are you it’s been a while do you have a moment it’s nice to see you again is this a bad time or should I come through the window later?—_ but maybe this wasn’t something to joke about.

Yet he’d never had to think of something like this before—there was no precedent for a low-stakes, normal meeting between them. The first time he met Shion he broke into his house bloody and dying and desperate, and when they reunited years later he crashed into No.6 on a rescue mission and there wasn’t time for pleasantries. And he was so young then and only knew how to be brash, and should he be different this time? Hadn’t things changed?

Or have they not, what with his overcautious thinking. Old habits die hard—a cliché, but apt, and wasn’t he going back now to do things right this time, because he had seen the world like he wanted and while he wasn’t the type to settle down—and that sounded like such an antiquated, tired old thing—he could admit there was something in him he desired that he couldn’t find with the musician, or the traveler, or the singer, nor any companion he merely talked with on his travels, and his mind, inevitably, wound itself into a thought like a spiral that always found Shion at its center.

But getting rid of the ice that had inevitably, he thought, cooled on their relationship over the years—should he break it, should he melt it, would it magically become a glacier when he touched it, multiplying in on itself in repulsion to his touch—it was huge and unpredictable, and thinking about it did little help, and so he distracted himself with the afters, with mountains, stories he could tell weeks down the line in order to propel his feet forward to the future physically and not allow his mind to stall and start backpedaling.

Starting the journey was always the hardest part. That he knew well. Maybe when he got there the idea would strike him then, impromptu, like the singer who could improvise songs—the complete opposite of Nezumi, who knew all his songs from the forest people, passed down like heirlooms from generation to generation.

But he was still at least three months away from No.6. There would be time enough to think, and to collect new stories. He just had to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and wake up one day to find himself there, and the rest would fall into place, somehow.

At least he hoped so.

**Author's Note:**

> My writing and editing process lately seems to be: writing an impromptu drabble, not knowing where to go with it, abandoning it for six months, revisiting it on a whim and deciding it’s not bad, then editing it a bit and slapping it onto AO3 with a shrug. Thus, through a heavy and prolonged labor for such a small fic, this has finally has been born and released into the world.
> 
> The title of this fic comes from Percy Shelley’s Mont Blanc, which, as you might guess, is about Shelley writing a love letter to a mountain.


End file.
